After he finished at San Francisco State, White served 24 months in the military. He did not immediately get accepted into graduate school. Luckily, San Francisco State was creating a Master's program and agreed to admit him to the program and help him gain admission to a doctorate program. Two years later, he was accepted at Michigan State. In his quest to reform the education system, White rejects the use of white middle class norms in determining the standards of education. While at
California State University, Long Beach, White helped in establishing the Educational Opportunities Program (EOP) which became a program implemented across the California State University campuses. In 1968, White helped found the
Association of Black Psychologists along with a few other Black Psychologists during the 1968 conference of the
American Psychological Association. "We cannot depend on them to define us. We have to take charge and define ourselves. We need to build our own psychology." This quote was a result of the meeting of those few Black Psychologists who saw a need for change in how psychology is applied to Blacks. During this same time, while serving as a professor and dean of undergraduate studies, White yielded to the needs of the students in helping to establish the first
Black Studies Program during the
1968 strike at San Francisco State University. In addition to his research, Joseph White was a professor who had been a practicing psychologist as well as a consultant. White had worked as a psychologist to five hospitals and three clinics in Southern California and over the years had served as a consultant for school districts, universities, private organizations, drug prevention programs, and government agencies.
"Toward a Black Psychology" Joseph White's 1970 article "Toward a Black Psychology", published in Ebony Magazine, was a seminal document in the formation of African-American Psychology as a professional field and the rise of ethnic and cultural psychology. The article argued that whatever the future of race relations and the destiny of Black people, the creation of a Black Psychology was necessary because the psychology created by White people could never adequately apply to African-Americans. This is because White psychologists would fail to account for the lived Black experience. One example White uses in the text is the idea of White psychologists assuming a black child is under-educated based on how the child uses grammar and syntax rather than understanding the child is speaking from an
African-American English dialect. White went further to point out that the application of mainstream White psychology to Black people resulted in weakness-oriented deficit finding, rather than an accurate appraisal of the situation of people of African descent.
Death White died on 21 November 2017 from a heart attack on a plane while flying to visit his family in
St. Louis,
Missouri for Thanksgiving. == Personal life ==